hard together.

"They tell me men love the nearest woman always. I was the only
one--"

"Yes, you were the only one," said Franklin slowly, "and you always
will be the only one. Good-bye."

It seemed to him he heard a breath, a whisper, a soft word that said
"good-bye." It had a tenderness that set a lump in his throat, but it
was followed almost at once with a calmer commonplace.

"We must go back," said Mary Ellen. "It is growing dark."

Franklin wheeled the team sharply about toward the house, which was
indeed becoming indistinct in the falling twilight. As the vehicle
turned about, the crunching of the wheels started a great gray prairie
owl, which rose almost beneath the horses' noses and flapped slowly
off. The apparition set the wild black horse into a sudden simulation
of terror, as though he had never before seen an owl upon the prairies.
Rearing and plunging, he tore loose the hook of one of the
single-trees, and in a flash stood half free, at right angles now to
the vehicle instead of at its front, and struggling to break loose from
the neck-yoke. At the moment they were crossing just along the head of
one of the _coulees_, and the struggles of the horse, which was upon
the side next to the gully, rapidly dragged his mate down also. In a
flash Franklin saw that he could not get the team back upon the rim,
and knew that he was confronted with an ugly accident. He chose the
only possible course, but handled the situation in the best possible
way. With a sharp cut of the whip he drove the attached horse down
upon the one that was half free, and started the two off at a wild race
down the steep _coulee_, into what seemed sheer blackness and immediate
disaster. The light vehicle bounded up and down and from side to side
as the wheels caught the successive inequalities of the rude descent,
and at every instant it seemed it must surely be overthrown. Yet the
weight of the buggy thrust the pole so strongly forward that it
straightened out the free horse by the neck and forced him onward. In
some way, stumbling and bounding and lurching, both horses and vehicle
kept upright all the way down the steep descent, a thing which to
Franklin later seemed fairly miraculous. At the very foot of the pitch
the black horse fell, the buggy running full upon him as he lay lashing
out. From this confusion, in some way never quite plain to himself,
Franklin caught the girl out in his arms, and the next moment was